Tom Mulcair is going through a rough patch, by common consensus. Not only has the NDP leader been invisible for the past six weeks due to the media penumbra cast by his famous young Liberal rival, He Who Must Not Be Named; not only are the polls moving against him; but now he’s being roundly scolded and mocked for casting aspersions on the Supreme Court of Canada.

“In political terms,” writes the National Post’s Jonathan Kay, “(Mulcair is) now the weird taxi driver who won’t shut up about how the government is suppressing flying-car technology, until you hurriedly pay the bill and slam the door.” That’s a big ouch, for all those NDP partisans who believed, with good reason it seemed, that Mulcair was their Tony Blair — the centrist moderate who’d lead them out of their beads-and-sandals past on the fringes, to the beating heart of power. Or something like that.

But here’s the thing: Mulcair can still do this. In making hay of the recent furor in Quebec over whether or not a former Supreme Court chief justice improperly whispered advice to officials during the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982 (gasp!) The Grizzly is showing yet again that he understands his base. He’s crazy like a fox.

Outside Quebec, few know or care about the allegations contained in historian Frederic Bastien’s book, La Bataille de Londre. It’s ancient arcana. The Constitution is, in fact, repatriated. Presumably it will remain so. Even 30 years ago this would have been obscure stuff — as opposed to, say, the Gerda Munsinger Affair, which had an East German prostitute and a cabinet minister with a wooden leg, or Maggie Trudeau partying with The Stones.

The truth is that whatever gets written or said in English Canada about this “controversy,” from any perspective, will barely register beyond the small circle of people paid to care. Mulcair knows his efforts will be met with a glazed look and a shrug in Toronto and Vancouver. But in Quebec the Constitutional debate and all matters connected to it still galvanize. There the NDP will appear as champions of ordinary francophone Quebecers, in the face of a mutely indifferent federal monolith — gowned, no less.

In that respect, this is not so different from Justin Trudeau’s famous flirtation with “separatism” on French-language radio, a year and a bit ago. More than any policy direction it reveals a simple knack for reading and responding to the Quebec street.

Ah, but what about NDP fortunes in the rest of Canada? Threehundredeight.com’s weighted average of federal polls has the NDP at just 21.3 per cent now in Ontario, compared with 35 per cent for the Conservatives, and 38 per cent for the Liberals. Mulcair currently holds 21 Ontario seats. In 2015 the Trudeau-led Liberals will be gunning for all of them. Ontario accounts for a third of the seats in the House of Commons. What to do?

The answer, clearly, is the long-proffered shift to the centre, together with a personal re-branding of Mulcair that highlights his experience, in contrast with Justin Trudeau, and his democratic credentials, in contrast with Stephen Harper. The clunkiest of the party’s old socialist language was excised last month. Between now and 2015 the NDP will seek to show that Canadians needn’t choose between an idealistic leader whom they fear will not be a competent manager (Trudeau), and a competent manager who is in no way an idealist (Harper); they can have the best of both, in the person of Tom Mulcair.

Granted, for any of this to gain any traction in Ontario, let alone further west, two things need to happen. First, Mulcair needs to adopt a more constructive tone about the oilsands. He can do this, for starters, by paying greater attention to his lone Alberta MP, Edmonton-Strathcona’s Linda Duncan. Second, he needs to let it be known, sometime in the next year or so, that revisiting the federal Clarity Act is not at the very top of his list of priorities. This need not be a total climbdown, which would wound him in Quebec. It could be a pledge not to go there in a first term due to far more pressing matters of economic management, say, or some other fig leaf.

Taken together, such adjustments can get him back across the Ottawa River. Then it becomes a matter of waiting for Trudeau to stumble and Harper to accumulate more baggage. As long as Mulcair retains the bulk of his Quebec seats, he still has a shot at forming government.

And that is the meaning, from beginning to end, of the NDP leader’s Supreme-Court cage rattling. It is not surprising, or odd, or even alarming: It’s politics. Agree or disagree with Mulcair’s arguments, and question their relevance to the country as a whole. All fair. But he is an Opposition leader, not a prime minister. He needs to do things like this, if he’s to stay in the game.

I am a national political columnist for Postmedia News. My work appears in the National Post, on Canada.com, the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Halifax Chronicle-Herald... read more and Vancouver Sun, among other publications. I write primarily about national politics and policy.View author's profile